It was almost with regret that they left the train at Gettysburg. The noise or motion of the cars, and the uninterrupted succession of pleasant views from their windows had prevented conversation, in which none of them, from preoccupation, or from anxiety, from, in one person at least, sadness, or from, in this case to be exact, two persons, extreme happiness, cared to enter. And when Gettysburg was itself finally encountered, they found it in the last spasms of inordinate repletion. The most exorbitant greed of guide and hackman, guide-book man, publican and popcorn or peanut vendor, was abashed before a popular consumption that threatened to drive them into a confession of impotency. Everything that had cubic capacity, whether it moved or stood still, whether it was a vehicle or a house, was aching under the intolerable pressure of its human contents. Everywhere clouds of flags decorated the air. The houses were beribboned and beflagged, and innumerable lines crossing the streets in a web of suspensory confusion, carried pennants and pictures to the last limits of their carrying capacity, and to the bewilderment unutterable and admiration unrepressed of the crowds beneath them. These crowds had become almost stagnant because of the crowds in front of them, and these in turn by reason of other crowds in front of them, until the successional torpor seemed to reach out of sight, and presumably ended in some greater peripheral crowd, which, having attained its appointed place by choice or selection, refused to budge. To make their way, was almost impossible to the visitors, whether they besought the services of a driver, or tried the painful expedient of threading the human mass on foot. In this extremity they simply remained where they were at first arriving, hoping either the slow motion of the democratic assemblage would afford them some sort of escape, or at some critical moment the vast throng would resolve itself into dispersion, and under the influence of direction or force, get itself better adjusted to the requirements of its individuals.